CHAPTER SIX Ankgor Wat The airport at Siem Reap is small. Our plane careened down out of the night sky, skidded across the tarmac, and when we finally rolled to a stop there was only silence and darkness. We stepped down onto the landing field and were herded towards the customs house by a row of grim faced soldiers. In their hands were machine guns. Welcome to the heart of darkness. This is Cambodia. We lined up solemnly to pay for our visas. I handed an American twenty dollar bill over to an ‘official’ behind the desk and I saw him slip the bill into his pocket before I’d even fully turned my back. Outside the air was hot and thick with the musk of tropical vegetation. There were no birds singing, only the whish of the palm fronds in the evening breeze. A scurry of taxi drivers hit us outside and we chose one randomly to bump us across the dusty yellow road and down into the town of Siem Reap. I was with an older New Zealand couple I’d met in the line and they’d heard of a place called Sweet Dreams. Good enough for me. The problem was that the taxi driver was pretending that he’d never heard of it. He, of course, wanted to take us to another place he knew. “Very fine. Very good.” Undoubtedly it was his friend’s or brother’s place or something but we insisted on Sweet Dreams and he grudgingly turned down a little alley and dropped us off at a high cement wall. Immediately things changed for the better. We were met by the family that ran Sweet Dreams. All smiles and welcome. A frog hopped happily across the pavement at our feet and it was the first relief in a tense night. Soon I found myself in a clean room, six dollars a night, and I even had a fan whirling overhead. I stopped and breathed. I was in Cambodia and I was about to see a place that I have dreamed of for half my life. Only a few kilometers north of Siem Reap are the Temples of Angkor. Eight hundred years have come and gone since the city of Angkor shone on the world. Some say Angkor was the first city on earth to reach a population of one million. It was the capital of the ancient Khmer civilization, a kingdom that once stretched across the length of South East Asia. Most of it is now gone, eaten up by the jungle. The old houses and the shops were made of wood. Even the palaces of the kings were constructed of mahogany and teak and only the temples were built of stone because of an ancient Khmer belief. Only the gods, they thought, were worthy of such permanence and only their dwellings could be made out of stone. And so, today, all that remains of the city of Angkor are these temples, dotted like islands over a jungle landscape of three hundred square kilometers. The temples, in turn, are intricately carved with inscriptions in ancient Khmer and Sanskrit. Along the base of many of the temples are bas reliefs, statues embedded in the walls as if they are emerging from the stone, and these bas reliefs recount both the great Hindu epics and the rise and fall of the civilization at Angkor, a place far removed in both time and geography from anything I had yet seen. I was looking forward to unlocking some of their secrets. That is, if I was able to understand them at all. In the morning the birds were singing. I went down for breakfast and I was quickly introduced to the young man who would be my driver. I hadn’t asked for a driver and a guide is not strictly necessary here but at a dollar a day, it was a luxury worth taking advantage of. Vana, it turned out, was 23 years old. He wore an old green baseball cap and he smiled at me shyly. It was about then that I realized nobody here is much older than 25. The old people are all missing. They are all dead. The Killing Fields took care of that. Eighty percent of the Cambodian population has been born after 1980. That’s the year the Khmer Rouge were finally ousted from power. That’s the year when the true extent of their crimes against humanity became apparent. Well over two and a half million people perished here. This from a total population of just seven million. All the intellectuals were rounded up. Anyone who had anything to do with the West. All the teachers, all the professionals, anyone wearing glasses. They were tortured and murdered. Their bodies dumped in the rancid Killing Fields. Many more starved to death when the Khmer Rouge cleared out the capital city of Phnom Penh to the south. These people were shuttled onto farms and expected to eke out a living from the soil though they were shopkeepers and simple businessman who had never so much as planted a seed in their life. The Khmer Rouge, you see, were a neo Mao-ist regime who, taking their cue from the devastating Cultural Revolution in China, wanted to purify this land of all outside influences. It was an ill guided attempt to turn the clocks back to the great age of Angkor. They wanted to create something like a second Khmer empire. In the end that was not possible - no more so than trying to turn Europe back into the weave of monarchies it had once been, or re-creating the confederate states of the United States. It cannot work. And it is the ultimate folly of man to try to attempt it. Vana was born in the dying days of this terror. He was a gentle soul. He spoke English quite well and for the next few days I would ride behind him on his little motor scooter in the hot tropical wind. * * * The word ‘Khmer’ means slave - an ethnonym adopted later by their Thai and Vietnamese conquerors. What a telling epithet. The history of Cambodia is a history like no other - right up to the present day. Such a long sad tale. A tale of kings and snakes and rivers and gods. But like any good story, I would have to start at the beginning. I would have to start at the fabulous city of Angkor. We zipped up a vaguely paved road. I sat behind Vana on his motor scooter, squinting through the dust and sunlight. There was no indication at all that we were about to come upon one of the wonders of the world. A snake wiggled across the road, a monkey sat in the shade of a tree. We buzzed along past them and came first to a long moat running beside the road. It was still and the water flashed sharply in the sun. And then, just on the other side, the outer walls of Angkor Wat appeared. Angkor Wat is a temple built in the early years of the twelfth century. It is said to be the most perfect piece of architecture in the world. We rounded a corner and went up onto a dirt trail between some trees. Vana stopped and I hopped off. Before us was a bridge called the Rainbow Bridge. It went over the moat and in through the outer gates. I walked under the archway there and was in darkness for a moment. And then I came out into a world I could not believe. Before me stood Angkor Wat and it was true - like the Taj Mahal, I was suddenly faced by one of the great accomplishments of mankind. It was gorgeous, breathtaking, an edifice that no amount of adjectives could fully capture. Vana stood behind me, silent, letting me take in the view. When I finally turned, he came up beside me. “Do you see the lotus towers?” he said. And I saw them, one in each corner of the great building and a fifth, the most massive of all, rising up from the center of the temple, intricately carved, soaring darkly and majestically up into the sky. The ancient Khmer people adopted an old Hindu belief that a temple must be built to exact mathematical proportions. If the measurements of the temple are perfect, they thought, then there will also be perfection in the universe. I was looking at perfection. Angkor Wat is huge. It is actually the largest religious monument in the world, in area larger even than St. Peter’s in Rome. This temple took more than thirty years to build and is only one of hundreds dotted through the jungle here in the north of Cambodia. It is a Hindu temple - dedicated especially to the god Vishnu. Three monumental terraces rise up above a wide plain. The long rainbow bridge sweeps in towards them. The balustrades are long carved snakes. These are called nagas – ‘snake’ in Sanskrit – and they are an especially prominent symbol here. This is the stuff I was looking for, the ways these ancient minds thought, the ways in which they encoded their world. Between the outer walls and the temple itself were wide fields where a few dozen villagers were swinging their scythes and I couldn’t figure out if they were actually harvesting something or whether they were just cutting the long grass around the temple. But I knew Angkor Wat was built by such people once upon a time. The scene I was seeing was not so very much different than it had been eight hundred years before. I went into the temple and I had it almost to myself. A few villagers were inside gathered around their morning meals but there were very few tourists. Very few faces as white as mine. I climbed slowly up from level to level and at the top, the third terrace, up a steep set of rock steps I came up into the sanctum. Only the king and his high priests had been allowed here in the ancient days and from here you can see down over the whole complex. The lotus towers represent the five peaks of holy Mount Meru. Vana told me all this although I had no idea what Mount Meru was supposed to be. Pointing out across the fields, he said that the outer walls represented the mountain ranges that hem in the earth and, outside that, the deep and tranquil moat suggests the infinite seas that surround the world. And so, Angkor Wat is the world. It is the entire universe. This was the first of many metaphors that I would need to understand. The temple was the world. I thought about that, remembering back to my studies in linguistics. Metaphors, you see, are much more than literary devices, more than poetic tricks. A proper metaphor stands in for a whole field of meaning. Metaphors pervade language. They lie beneath the surface but form the context by which we systematize our thinking. Each language has them although they vary from language to language so much that misunderstanding, cross-cultural misunderstanding, often arises from a misreading of the underlying metaphors. Whole structures of meaning, whole ways of seeing the world, are imbedded in the phrases we utter. And these are truly the foundations of our Palace of Words. * * * Vana led me up to the second terrace. There are Buddhist monks here now, the young males in saffron robes, the old women in white. They burn incense and, on one sort of patio, an old man whom I had assumed was a monk had doffed his robes. He was bare-chested and sinewy. With an old broom he swept the stones there - where a puddle of water had gathered from the last rainstorm. It was hard to tell how old he might have been, sixty, seventy, perhaps, but I stopped and watched him for awhile. His thin arms pumped the broom and the swishing of its stalks echoed up through the stone architecture. Strangely entranced, I watched until he looked up at me. This was the first old person I had seen and there was something powerful in that. Even Vana seemed profoundly respectful of this old peasant monk and after a few moments pulled me away and down out onto the first terrace. Around the outside of the lower terrace ran the legendary bas reliefs of Angkor. They go on for eight hundred meters, along the side of the massive building, then around a corner, and on for eight hundred meters more until the entire base of the temple was covered - almost three and a half kilometers of carvings. Along the western walls, aligned as they are with the blood-red sunsets, are scenes of violence and destruction and death. Here are the battle scenes from the history of Angkor; curving and swirling armies locked in frozen stone. The armies of the great enemy, the Cham troops of ancient Vietnam, march across the walls glaring out across the centuries. In the other direction, on the eastern walls, the rising of the morning sun illuminates a set of very different carvings. These are the Hindu creation myths and there is one there, a set of carvings that runs for almost four hundred meters, that has become more famous than all the rest. It tells the story of the Churning of the Sea of Milk. * * * I’d come here very specifically to see this long story in stone. It was a sort of test for myself, a throwing of myself into the strange, into the completely and utterly alien. The Churning of the Sea of Milk is a central story in the Hindu epics and in order to understand it you must understand something of the god Vishnu. Hindu-ism, I must admit, is among the most confusing of religions for me. Hundreds and even thousands of gods attend the world. Some of my confusion rests in the fact that gods such as Vishnu can appear in different incarnations. I mean, I’m still having problems trying to figure out the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, what luck would I have with a God that appears in at least nine different forms? Vishnu, the Preserver, descends to the rescue of the world whenever it is threatened by a great catastrophe. Nine times it has happened. A tenth is still to come. Vishnu appears as different Avatars. Sometimes this is a human form (as in his incarnation as the man, Krishna) and sometimes he comes in the form of an animal. Always, though, he guides the world to an ultimate triumph over chaos. And so, this set of carvings represents one of his nine incarnations, this time as a turtle. What happened was that, before the world existed as we know it, the gods and demons were warring with each other. The fighting and disputing had gone on for so long and had grown to such violence that the very emergence of the universe had been lost in a swell of chaos. Here, I admit I am already very unclear on the details. I keep, of course, trying to wedge the story into my own western conceptions and it simply won’t fit. At any rate, Vishnu appeared to these opposing gods and demons and gave them a task in which they would seemingly work against each other but, in reality, be working together. Confused? Yeah, me too - until I saw the line of carvings. It was to be a tug of war, very much like the game we know in the West. The gods would pull on one side and the demons would pull on the other. The rope itself was really a snake and there’s the naga symbol again. The only difference between this and a simple tug of war game was that the rope, or the snake in this case, had wrapped itself around a mountain between the two pulling sides. Mount Meru, of course, the same mountain that Angkor Wat represents. It was all starting to come together. Sort of. So, with the gods tugging on one side and then the demons on the other, they slowly began to churn this mountain, like the agitator in the center of a washing machine. Back and forth. The mountain swung around one way and then back the other so that it churned up the cosmos. Vishnu, now in the form of a turtle, held the mountain on his back and together the gods and demons spun the universe into being. Such a strange story. But it was exactly what I was looking for. Something so different, so loaded with alien metaphors that I would have to struggle mightily to make any real sense of it. I wanted to find something so profoundly outside my own experience that I could see just how far the elastic band of human thought snapped. What do these long lines of carved figures mean? They tug on a giant snake, turning a mountain, churning the Sea of Milk. I can only reach for a western metaphor: The Sea of Milk is our own Milky Way, the deep stars of night. And that made sense to me - the gods spinning the universe into existence. And with the spiral galaxies left as confirmation of this swirling and churning, it seemed apt. Of course it’s not. I was nowhere near the mark. It’s a difficult thing, teasing out metaphors. According to the Hindu epic, the churning spun out magical elephants and strange dancing girls called Apsaras (whose beautiful images are all over Angkor). They had nothing to do with our modern Western conceptions of the universe. I’d done the best I could to try and figure it all out but I was no Carl Jung. I was no Northrop Frye. I couldn’t find the archetypes that would match up with any of the myths I was familiar with. I could not sort out the metaphors of this strange story. They were simply not available to my ways of thinking. * * * Later, Vana told me that there was more to this story. He explained it carefully, watching me nod when I understood, and going back over it when he saw that I wasn’t getting it. The snake, the naga, was named Vasuki. And this snake, being looped around the mountain and being tugged back and forth by the gods and demons... well, he gradually became sick with all the pulling and turning. Finally he began to throw up. He vomited out a terrible blue poison, just as the universe was being churned into being. The god Vishnu – already holding up the mountain - could do little but watch as the blue vomit spread out like a mushroom cloud. Another of the great Hindu gods, Shiva, appeared then and swallowed the poison even as it threatened to destroy the new world being born. Shiva drank down the dangerous venom and it burned him so badly that it left his throat a frightful colour of blue. But in his sacrifice he saved the world. And there was something vaguely familiar about that. A god and a sacrifice. It fit in with another story I’d heard: A couple of hundred years ago, when the first real contacts began to be made between Cambodia and the West, a young missionary appeared in the jungle eager to preach the gospel of Christ. The man tried to introduce the idea of Jesus to the villagers. He tried to impress upon them the importance of Jesus’ sacrifice upon the cross. He showed the local people his wooden crucifix and tried to explain it all to them but they were profoundly uninterested. An old villager, taking pity on the missionary, took it upon himself to tell the story of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk. He told the missionary of the snake Vasuki and the spinning and the spewing out of his venom. And the missionary, who apparently really was a clever young chap, thought about it for a long time and then painted his own little figure of Jesus a deep and resounding shade of blue. He brought it out again and this time, slowly, understanding came into the eyes of the villagers. The missionary held up the blue crucifix for all to see. It is the sacrifice of the god, he explained. He has sacrificed himself in order to save the world. It is the same. And so, metaphors can, with difficulty, be unfolded. Jesus, in this case, just needed to be blue. That was the Khmer – actually the Hindu – symbol for sacrifice. This the villagers understood and so, too, I was beginning to understand. * * * Over the next few days, Vana – on his puttering little motor scooter – took me to temple after temple. At one temple, I was followed for an hour or so by a bright young boy who must have been about seven. I’d seen many children put to work here. I called this little guy ‘Cowboy’ because of the print of a cartoon cowboy on his ragged t-shirt. He told me he would be my guide but for the most part I showed him around the place, explaining as best I could what my guidebook was telling me about the history and the architecture of this particular temple. At the end I bought him a ubiquitous coca-cola and he seemed delighted with the deal. And so Cowboy, probably much as Vana had done before him, was learning English. It is dangerous though. The kids can make a decent living by learning this foreign tongue but there is a cost. Another small slice of the world will become generic, a part of the all-consuming face of the west. Should I be feeding the children coca-cola? Will it turn their young throats blue? Vana and I developed a strange relationship too. After spending each day trundling around Angkor we returned in the evenings to the Sweet Dreams hostel. He would ask if I was hungry and then disappear around the back to the kitchen. Anyway, Vana came out one night with a dish of food. He insisted that I sit and that he serve me. Like a waiter… or no, more like a servant. I tried to get him to sit too and finally, uncomfortably, he slid in beside me, unsure of his role. It went against everything he had known. That we could be equals. That we could be friends. We talked some more and he seemed to lighten a bit. Finally, he leaned into me and said, “Tomorrow, I can take you to the Linga river. This is something you must see.” “All right.” “It’s far,” he warned. “That’s okay.” “So, we go early?” “Alright.” And I braced myself to get up in the dark hours before the dawn. * * * Vana took me further north than most people go, to the furthest outlying ruins of the old city of Angkor. Along the pot-holed road, we saw Cambodia as it is now. A land of water buffaloes and rice paddies. In the distance there are the sacred mountains, the Phnom, and all along the way we saw people working, harvesting the land as they have done for centuries. We stopped once while Vana got his bearings. We had already been travelling for more than an hour and the place was drawing near. We finally came to a nondescript trail-head and Vana stopped to see if I was really up for it. It was four or five kilometers to the top, he said, and the day was scorching. He asked me if I’d be okay and I said that I was used to hiking. It was something I did almost every weekend in the far off mountains where I lived. This would be very different though. This was hiking through the jungle. I talked of bears and he talked of snakes and we each tried to scare each other all the way up the hot and winding trail. We came after a time to a river and followed a red-earth path along its banks. It was quiet and it seemed like we were far away from anywhere. Here and there we saw signs that the ancients had been here first. There were faces carved right into the rocks of the river. The water splashed over the eerie carved faces and it was magical. For almost a thousand years these carvings have been here, the water splashing over the strange sunken heads. We walked past them and then all at once the river opened up into a pool with a waterfall cascading down into it. We went scampering across the rocks like children and I could see now that my own skin was growing brown, like Vana’s, and for the first time I did feel like we were friends, like I was allowed to be here. At the top of the waterfall we sat and Vana told me a story that was something very, very different than the stories I had seen on the temples. Cambodia has always been famous for its folk tales. They may be even older than the Hindu epics and they are certainly at the heart of what it means to be Cambodian. The Hindu books had come to Cambodia with the omnipresent Sanskrit. Modern Khmer is now written in this same swirling text but the ancient Khmer language survives on its own, untempered by outside influences and it is most purely heard in its folk tales. Like Aesop’s fables, the Cambodian tales are often allegories. They have morals to be learned and are often thinly veiled references to real situations and the folly that we so often commit. Vana told me one of these stories, up there on top of the waterfall, and it is something I will never forget: When the world was still young, he said, and the palaces of Angkor were newly constructed, shining and sparkling like the first flowers of morning, there was a young king on the throne. He was, of course, delighted in his beautiful new city. In fact, he thought, it was the distilled essence of beauty. And so, convinced that the city’s beauty lay in its newness, in the fact that it hadn’t been dirtied by the years, the king decreed that nothing old should appear in the city. Nothing should stain the city’s beauty. And so first of all, the old things were removed or hidden and, in time, even the old people were banned from its streets and ramparts. There was one old man who had lived in a simple hut for as long as anyone could remember. But, he too was forced to leave the city that had been built around him. He took up his things and fled, coming after a time to an old cave that lay on the banks of a swirling river. Perhaps even the same river that we now sat beside. The years went by but, of course, all things change, all things are impermanent, and the day came when the armies of the great enemy, the Cham from far-off Vietnam, arrived at the gates of the city. They had come with elephants and war chariots and were clearly the superior force. The young king of Angkor, in desperation, sought to negotiate with the King of the Cham before the city could be laid to waste. The king cowered before the Great Cham and the conqueror laughed and mocked him. This Great Cham was a lover of riddles and here he saw his chance for some fun. “You can keep your kingdom,” he said, “if only you can answer me this.” He held out a piece of wood. It was as long as a thigh bone and just a little wider, cut as it was from a young tree not far from the palace. “Tell me,” the Great Cham said, “which way this branch has grown. Which is the bottom and which is the top? Give me the right answer and I shall spare your city. You have one day to decide.” In desperation, the young king went down to the swirling river to think. He sat by its shores and stared at the riddle stick the Cham had given him. Which was the bottom? It was impossible to tell. After a time, the old man emerged from the cave. The old man could see the distress on the young king’s features and, moved by the king’s weeping, he came down out of his cave to see if he could help. And when the king showed the branch to the old man and explained the riddle, the old man took it and heaved it into the water. There, by the shore, was a small whirlpool and as the piece of wood neared it he called to the king and told him to watch the piece of wood carefully. The branch, he said, will be pulled down on the side that is heaviest. That is its bottom. That is where it grew from. The top will bob up and the river will tug at the bottom. And so it did. And so the king pulled the branch from the whirlpool and ran with the answer back to the mighty Cham. And when all was done and the armies of the Cham had gone, the young king realized the Truth. He saw at last that beauty was fleeting and that the wisdom that comes with age is infinitely more important. The old man had saved his kingdom and the king fell on bended knees and asked for his forgiveness. The elderly he decided are the wise ones of the land and thereafter in the land of Angkor it is the old ones who will be the most honored. It is the old ones whose souls inhabit these stones. It is the old ones who remember most clearly. * * * There is a famous saying in Khmer: Ngoey skát àon dák króap. It translates as: “The immature rice stalk stands erect, while the mature stalk, heavy with grain, bends over.” What it’s really about is ‘bowing down,’ humbling yourself before your elders. Khmer parents teach this to their children. They must show respect toward their elders by bowing down to them. In Khmer, the word àon is used to describe this show of respect, a bow in effect, although it is also used to describe the bending over of the mature rice stalk. Seen in the rice plant, it is an indication of the bounty, richness, and maturity of the grain. In a person; it indicates good character and respect and, of course, wisdom.
 The Mon-Khmer language is spoken by more than seven million people in Cambodia. It is of a family of languages called Austro-Asiatic. Most of the other languages of this family are quite small. They are spoken in pockets from Northeastern India all the way to Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago. The two largest language groups are the Khmer language and the neighboring language of Vietnamese. But unlike Vietnamese (which has six tones) or Chinese (which has four tones) or even Thai (which has five tones), Khmer is somewhat unusual in Asia in that it is not a tonal language. Even so, I confess that I didn’t learn very much of it. Vana spoke English well enough to converse on almost any subject and, even when I asked him some difficult questions about Buddhism, he took it upon himself to go and look up the English words he didn’t know – he must have had a dictionary of sorts back in his hut – and then give me a better answer in the morning. On what would be my last day here, Vana and I went to a section of palaces and terraces at the centre of Angkor. It was called Angkor Thom. This was the very heart of the city, a city within a city, and it was surrounded by a massive wall twelve kilometers in circumference. In each of the cardinal directions there were gates in the old walls and guarding the gates, lining the roads that enter them, were long columns of carved stone figures. We puttered in through the south gate on Vana’s motorscooter and I saw them. Between the statues, strung from one stone figure to the next, was a long stone balustrade. Vana told me to look closer and I saw that it was a snake. It was Vasuki, the naga, and these were the gods and demons from the Churning of the Sea of milk. The story was obvious but this time they were spinning the city of Angkor into being. Spinning it up from the very fabric of the universe. The Khmer had taken the ancient Hindu epic and made it their own. Above the gates I saw a large carved Boddhisatva face. Many believe that this is the face of the last and greatest of the kings of Angkor looking down upon you as you enter his city. In the year 1181, Jayavarman the Seventh came to power and it was he who constructed this central city, the area known as Angkor Thom. Vana squinted into the sun and told me that Jayavarman’s royal palace was inside these walls. Little is known of this Jayavarman though one thing is certain. This king broke with the Hindu religion that had come before him and became a devout Buddhist. From this moment on Cambodia has been a Buddhist country. At the exact center of Angkor Thom sits an ancient Buddhist temple called the Bayon. At its entrance sit fortune-tellers and sellers of incense. There are still saffron robed monks gliding amongst the galleries of the Bayon. Buddhism, of course, has a particular relevance here. A release from the suffering of the world is available through Buddhism and no one has suffered more than the people of Cambodia. Among the Buddha’s last words to his disciples were these: “If a snake lives in your room and you wish to have a peaceful sleep, you must first chase it out. And so it is you must break the bonds of worldly passions and drive them away as you would a snake.” Here again was a transcendental idea. The snake that churned Angkor into being must now be chased away. The symbols were changing and it was time for dissolution. It was time for the great collapse. Around the lower galleries of the Bayon there are more bas reliefs. As they do at Angkor Wat the carvings encircle the temple but here the stone gives way to something wholly different. Perhaps it is the Buddhist influence but for once there are no more scenes of kings and their epics. Here are carvings of the everyday people. The life of the Khmer peasants from eight hundred years ago. They show the women of the city, gathering at the market. The potters producing the cups and plates and a group of wine drinkers who watch from a window a distant performance of the royal dancers. There are a whole host of shopkeepers touting their wares. Further on there are sailors, fishermen on the nearby Tonle Sap lake. One man has mysteriously fallen overboard and a crocodile rises to meet him. The reliefs blend together so that in the next scene there are gamblers betting on a cockfight. Another group of men true a wheel. It is a kingdom of the people under the wisest and gentlest of kings. Jayavarman the Buddhist. After Jayavarman died in 1221, there were no more temples built at Angkor. The city began its long inevitable decay. It was almost as if, in only a generation or two, the people left behind their desire for worldly things and all ideas of grandeur. Year after year, the jungle encroached on the great city. The wooden buildings rotted and collapsed and at last the temples themselves were lost in the undergrowth. It was the end of Angkor. The turning had been completed. I said goodbye to Vana that night. I would be leaving early in the morning and I would not see him again. file://localhost/Users/gedixon/Pictures/iPhoto%20Library/Originals/2009/22-Jul-09/Pilgrim_Palace_Words.jpg

By Glenn Dixon

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